Insularity

“My body is an island. Like suspended islands, we are bodies adrift between the laws of humans and the designs of nature.
Simone de Beauvoir said that ‘to be free is also to want others’.
The pot is a symbol of the world. By carrying the pot on my head, I recreate mythologies. I take the place of Atlas, proposing a woman as the pillar that supports the world and nourishes it. Woman axis mundi.
I walk between the ground and the sky, between one and the other, I build bridges and transit between worlds. Do you see me, do I catch your eye, does anyone join the walk? How do you feel in your island body?
We are the future and the south is our north.”
— Jacira da Conceição

Jacira da Conceição is a ceramicist, sculptor and visual artist with roots in Cape Verde. By insisting on processes of valorisation, collective labour agreements, equity and the many doubts about meritocracy, she thinks about the importance of utopia and of being a woman as drivers of social and cultural revolutions.
In a partnership between BoCA and Futurama, Jacira presents the performance “Insularity” in Lisbon’s public space, tracing an itinerary that encourages the deterritorialisation-reterritorialisation of the invisible based on the pot as a symbolic object and the journey through the city as an exploration of the subjectivity of the walker. Between the (dis)balance between the invisible present and the unpredictable future, the artist paves the way for the possibility of the new, of reimagining and redefining other routes, without centres and without points of departure or arrival.